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Hello, all:  The National Association for Museum Exhibition and AAM  
are planning a wonderful retreat at Asilomar in Monterey California  
from May 31-June 2.  Full description and links below.

We want to bring voices from outside our field to bear on the  
challenges of collaboration and creativity, so we are going to have  
"instigators" from Burning Man, from Industrial Light and Magic, and  
from World Without Oil, along with some great museum people.

Also, it is right after Maker Faire, which is another amazing  
experience just a few miles up the road.

Please please please try to come, I think it can be great.

Eric Siegel
Director and Chief Content Officer
NY Hall of Science
President of
The National Association for Museum Exhibition



SAVE THE DATE: Creativity and Collaboration Retreat--May 31-June 2,  
2009 in Monterey, CA.

I am pleased to announce the Creativity and Collaboration (C2)  
Retreat, an exciting new collaboration with AAM that will recharge the  
creative batteries of experienced exhibition professionals.   C2 will  
be an important opportunity to step away from your day to day  
activities, engage with new perspectives from outside the museum  
profession, and build stronger networks with your colleagues.

The retreat will take place from May 31 to June 2, 2009 at Asilomar, a  
historic beachfront conference center in Monterey, CA http://www.visitasilomar.com/ 
.

Details can be found on the AAM website here: http://www.aam-us.org/getinvolved/learn/creativityandcollaboration.cfm 
.  The C2 planning team has also set up a participatory C2 web site  
at  http://createcollaborate.org/.

Goals. The fundamental goal of the retreat is to engage new voices  
from outside the museum field to inform our creative processes.  The  
target audience for C2 is experienced museum exhibition professionals  
looking to expand their horizons.  This is a time of dramatic  
transformation for museums, and fresh thinking is clearly required.   
To that end, we have engaged five amazing people to challenge our  
assumptions: Kate Shaw, the head of training for LucasFilm; Harley  
DuBois, community wrangler for the Burning Man festival;  Ken Eklund,  
designer of mass collaboration games like World Without Oil; and Mike  
Petrich and Karen Wilkinson, who run the Learning Studio at the  
Exploratorium.  We will also have a behind the scenes tour of the  
Monterey Bay Aquarium led by their extraordinarily creative (and  
collaborative!) exhibition team.

Learn by Doing. C2 will be an experiential learning retreat, we will  
learn by engaging in collaborative activities that take advantage of  
Asilomar's beautiful natural setting. What exactly are these  
activities?  Well, the planning team of Nina Simon, Jenny Sayre  
Ramberg, Darcie Fohrman, Greg Stevens, and I have set up the  
createcollaborate.org web site to harvest suggestions.  Of course, we  
and our "instigators" have lots of ideas, but we really do want to  
hear from you.

Timing. A couple of points about timing.  We have to know about the  
registration for Asilomar by mid-March, and we do anticipate this  
selling out (we are limited to 80 people), so please register early.   
We would love to have strong NAME membership representation.

Also, by good fortune, the Bay area Maker Faire http://makerfaire.com/  
is happening the weekend before the retreat.  If you would like to  
make your own arrangements to come out a day or two early, we will  
meet with the organizers of that amazing event, details to follow.

The 800 Lb Gorilla. I also want to directly address the 800 pound  
gorilla in the room:  the economy.  With all the reductions in funding  
and scaling back of museum activities, how can a workshop like C2 be  
justified?  While the prices for registration and lodging are modest,  
and travel is quite inexpensive now, we are all confronting these  
kinds of challenges.  We suggest that there has never been a more  
important time to consider "out of the box" strategies, as the  
resources for business-as-usual may not be available.  Second, on a  
personal and pragmatic level, this is an essential time to build and  
strengthen your personal working network, to share resources and ideas  
and help to provide flexibility and opportunity in a changing job  
market.  That said, we know resources are tight, and we are working to  
establish a limited number of C2 Fellowships.  We will keep you posted  
on that.

So, that is the overview of C2.  The planning team, made up of current  
and former NAME Board members and our colleagues at AAM, has been  
great.  We are waiting to hear from you at createcollaborate.org, and  
look forward to seeing you in Monterey in May!

Best Regards,


Eric Siegel
President of NAM


Eric Siegel
esiegel at nyscience dot org

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